2009/08/13

This is kinda “WTF?”. I wanted to use Wake-On-LAN (WOL) with our Dell Optiplex 740 workstations. By default, WOL wasn’t enabled in BIOS, so I set the two relevant options by disabling the low power mode and enabling the wake-up option of the NIC. After some testing with Dameware’s WOL function (which didn’t work) and some other tools (wol, winwol, wolcmd also didn’t work) I finally woke up my testclient successful out of hibernate with Magic Packet Sender. Also WOL worked out of standby mode. But only with Magic Packet Sender, although I configured other tools to use port 9 UDP too (can anyone explain me that?). At last I tried to wakeup the PC from poweroff. I got frustrated – it didn’t work. Hibernate and standby was never a problem, poweroff = no reaction. I called the Dell business support, but unfortunately they also had no clue. After some googleing I found this forum link, where other users report similar problems with other workstation models. Up to now Dell did not respond to their posts…

UPDATE

Okay, the Dell support guy I talked to has also no solution. In the meantime I discovered that all our Dell workstations (also the Precision T3400 and older Optiplex) don’t wake up from poweroff. Seems that I’ve to investigate… I will post updates here.

2009/08/12

Managing Dell workstations with the Dell Client Configuration Toolkit is great 😉 Just install it on your workstations or boot from a WinPE disk including it and you are able to modify your BIOS settings using really simple commands. For example to enable Wake-On-LAN:

2009/08/11

Okay, perhaps I’m stupid or something, but what I have to do in order to turn on printer sharing on Vista without clicking on “enable” in the Network and Sharing Center and without using group policies? I want a registry key. Where is it? Didn’t find anything … :S